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Monday, April 3, 2017

'Blame Russia' campaign now includes blaming Russians for Marco Rubio losing. Their 'solution' so we won't get fooled by Russians ever again: Soviet style censorship of US media, a 'Ministry of Truth'-Robert Parry, 3/31/17

When Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign failsseemingly because
he was a wet-behind-the-ears candidate who performed like a robotduring debates repeating the same talking points over and over, you
might have cited those shortcomings to explain why “Little Marco” flamed
out. However, if you did, that would make you a Russian “useful idiot”!The “real” reason for his failure, as we learned from Thursday’s Senate
Intelligence Committee hearing, was Russia!

When Hillary Clinton boots a presidential election that was literally
hers to lose, you might have thought that she lost because she insisted
on channeling her State Department emails through a private server that
endangered national security; that she gave paid speeches to Wall
Street and tried to hide the contents from the voters; that she called
half of Donald Trump’s supporters “deplorables”; that she was a widely
disliked establishment candidate in an anti-establishment year; that she
was shoved down the throats of progressive Democrats by a Democratic
Party hierarchy that made her nomination “inevitable” via the
undemocratic use of unelected “super-delegates”; that some of her State
Department emails were found on the laptop of suspected sex offender
Anthony Weiner (the husband of Clinton’s close aide Huma Abedin); and
that the laptop discovery caused FBI Director James Comey to briefly
reopen the investigation of Clinton’s private email server in the last
days of the campaign.

You might even recall that Clinton herself blamed her late collapse
in the polls on Comey’s announcement, as did other liberal luminaries
such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. But if you thought those
thoughts or remembered those memories, that is just more proof that you
are a “Russian mole”!

As we all should know in our properly restructured memory banks and
our rearranged sense of reality, it was all Russia’s fault! Russia did
it by undermining our democratic process through the clever means of
releasing truthful information via WikiLeaks that provided evidence of
how the Democratic National Committee rigged the nomination process
against Sen. Bernie Sanders, revealed the contents of Clinton’s hidden
Wall Street speeches, and exposed pay-to-play features of the Clinton
Foundation in its dealings with foreign entities.

You see the evil Russians undermined American democracy by arming the
American people with truthful information! How dastardly is that! Could
Boris and Natasha do any better or worse? ...Though
WikiLeaks denies getting the two batches of emails – the DNC’s and
Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s – from the Russians, have we
ruled out that the emails might have been slipped to WikiLeaks by the FX
characters Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, presumably in disguise?

Oddly, too, when similar factual revelations come from
Western-favored leaks, such as the purloined financial records of a
Panamanian law firm known as the “Panama Papers,” we hail the
disclosures regardless of the dubious methods that were used to steal
them, especially if the contents can be spun to undermine disfavored
governments like Russia (while also inconveniently embarrassing a few
unimportant “’allies”).

But if you make that comparison or you note how the U.S. Agency for
International Development and the U.S. government-funded National
Endowment for Democracy have supported various “independent” journalists
and news outlets to advance U.S. propaganda, that makes you guilty of
“moral equivalence,” another serious offense.

So now that you know how the game is played, you had the Senate
Intelligence Committee eliciting testimony from people like media
watcher Clint Watts, who seems to believe that any criticism of a U.S.
government official (at least anyone he likes) must be directed by
Russia!

“This past week we observed social media accounts discrediting U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan,” said Watts, who is billed in The Washington Post as “an expert in terrorism forecasting and Russian influence operations.”

Gee, I know you might say that you went on Facebook last week to
criticize Ryan for bungling the “repeal and replace” of Obamacare by
proposing a scheme that managed to alienate both right-wing and moderate
Republicans as well as all Democrats. But that onlyproves you are
indeed a Russian disinformation agent!(Watts also claimed that Sen.
Rubio’s presidential bid “anecdotally suffered” from an online Russian
campaign against him.)

As Watts describes these nefarious Russian schemes, they are so
nefarious that they don’t have any discernible earmarks or detectable
predictability. In his view, the Russians don’t want to help any
particular person or group, just undermine America’s faith in its
democracy.

As Watts puts it, Russians attack “people on both sides of the aisle …
solely based on what they [the Russians] want to achieve in their own
landscape, whatever the Russian foreign policy objectives are. They win
because they play both sides.” In other words, any political comment
that an American might make might just prove that you’re a traitor.

But Watts singled out President Trump for special criticism because
he supposedly has tweeted about Russian-planted conspiracy theories.
“Part of the reason active measures have worked in this U.S. election is
because the commander-in-chief has used Russian active measure at times
against his opponent,” Watts said, citing Trump’s bogus claims about
2016 voter fraud and his earlier silliness about President Obama’s
Kenyan birthplace. Yes, as we all know, every goofy idea is manufactured
in Russia. Americans are incapable of developing their own nonsense.

Perhaps what is even more frightening than the Russians letting
Americans in on how Washington’s political process really works – by
somehow slipping WikiLeaks some evidence of Democratic Party bigwigs
tilting the Democratic primaries to ensure Clinton’s nomination and
revealing what Clinton told those Wall Street bankers – is the idea thatthe U.S. government should be enlisted to enforce what Americans get to
see and hear....

Presumably, the 200 or so Web sites on PropOrNot’s black list would
be the first cut for the new Ministry of Truth since many of them have
published articles that raised questions about the accuracy of claims
made by the U.S. State Department or they have expressed the belief that
there may be two sides to complex issues – when Americans are supposed
to hear only the side that Official Washington wants them to hear.

Some of these “Russian propaganda” Web sites – prior to the Iraq War –
even raised doubts about the U.S. government’s certainty that Saddam
Hussein had stockpiles of WMDs. Thank goodness the Internet wasn’t as
widely used back then or perhaps many Americans would have doubted the
truth-telling by The New York Times and The Washington Post, which
dutifully passed on the U.S. government’s pronouncements about Hussein’s
secret WMDs.

Surely, in 2002-03, the Russians must have been behind the resistance
by those few Web sites to the WMD group think that all the respectable
people just knew to be true. How else can you explain the skepticism?
And maybe Russia was responsible for the U.S. government’s failure to
find any of those WMD stockpiles. Curse you, Russia!

The craziness has now become the focus of an official Senate
investigation into Russian “meddling” in American political life. We
have taken another step down the path of a New Cold War that blends a
New McCarthyism with a New Orwellianism." image above from Consortium News

................

Added: Globalist media obsessed with persuading US taxpayers to finance annihilation of the planet via nuclear war. (Must get rid of Putin):

Raddatz, the network’s chief global affairs correspondent, presented
the Syrian conflict as simply a case of barbaric aggression by the
Syrian government and its Russian allies against the Syrian people,
especially the innocents living in Aleppo.

“Just days ago, the State Department called for a war crimes
investigation of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and its ally,
Russia, for their bombardment of Aleppo,” Raddatz said.

“The situation in Aleppo presents a heartrending and nettlesome
concern. Al Qaeda fighters and their rebel allies,including some who
have been armed by the United States,are holed up in some neighborhoods
of eastern Aleppo. They’ve been firing rockets into the center and
western sections of Aleppo and they have shot civilians seeking to leave
east Aleppo through humanitarian corridors....

Siding with Al Qaeda

Raddatz also could have noted that a key reason why the recent
limited cease-fire failed was that the U.S.-backed “moderate” rebels in
east Aleppo had rebuffed Secretary of State John Kerry’s demand that
they separate themselves from Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, which now calls
itself the Syria Conquest Front.

Instead of breaking ties with Al Qaeda, some of these “moderate” rebel groups reaffirmed or expanded their alliances with Al Qaeda.
In other words, Official Washington’s distinction between Al Qaeda’s
terrorists and the “moderate” rebels was publicly revealed to be largely
a myth. But the reality of U.S.-aided rebels collaborating with the
terror group that carried out the 9/11 attackscomplicates the preferred
mainstream narrative of Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin “the bad
guys” versus the rebels “the good guys.”

If Raddatz had posed her question with the more complex reality
(rather than the simplistic, biased form that she chose) and if Clinton
still responded with her recipe of a “no-fly zone,”the obvious
follow-up would be: “Wouldn’t such a military intervention constitute
aggressive war against Syria in violation of the United Nations Charter
and the Nuremberg principles?

“And wouldn’t such a strategy risk tipping the military balance
inside Syria in favor of Al Qaeda and its jihadist allies, possibly even
its spinoff terror group, the Islamic State? And what would the United
States do then, if its destruction of the Syrian air force led to the
black flag of jihadist terror flying over Damascus as well as all of
Aleppo? Would a Clinton-45 administration send in U.S. troops to stop
the likely massacre of Christians, Alawites, Shiites, secular Sunnis and
other ‘heretics’?”

There would be other obvious and important questions that a more
objective Martha Raddatz would ask: “Would your no-fly zone include
shooting down Russian aircraft that are flying inside Syria at the
invitation of the Syrian government? Might such a clash provoke a
superpower escalation, possibly even invite nuclear war?”

But no such discussion is allowed inside the mainstream U.S. media’s
frame. There is an unstated assumption that the United States has the
unquestioned right to invade other countries at will, regardless of
international law, and there is a studied silence about this hypocrisy
even as the U.S. State Department touts the sanctity of international
law.

While Raddatz referenced “the heart-breaking video of a 5-year-old
Syrian boy named Omran sitting in an ambulance after being pulled from
the rubble after an air strike in Aleppo,” she seems to have no similar
sympathy for the slaughtered and maimed children of Iraq who suffered
under American bombs – or the people of Yemen who have faced a prolonged
aerial onslaught from Saudi Arabia using U.S. aircraft and
U.S.-supplied ordnance....Because of the horrors inflicted on Iraq – and the resulting chaos
that has now spread across the region and into Europe – Raddatz could
have asked Clinton, who as a U.S. senator voted for the illegal war,
whether she felt any responsibility for this carnage. Of course, Raddatz
would not ask that question because the U.S. mainstream media was
almost universally onboard the Iraq War bandwagon, which helps explain
why there has been virtually no accountability for those war crimes.

It is surely not the first time that the mainstream U.S. media has
failed the American people in this way, but – given the stakes of a
possible nuclear war with Russia – this propagandistic style of
“journalism”is fast becoming an existential threat."...................

Unfortunately a lot of those in positions of power seem to be in
denial of those facts. Then there are those who are uninterested in why.
Hillary was a terrible candidate, and at least some senior Dems seem to
be willing to ask how they can do better. Too many on the Republican
side seem to be oblivious that Trump did better than generic Republican,
and what the implications of that are. I am dubious that any other
candidate in the primaries could have done better than Donald Trump,
mostly because he had a brand independent of that of the Republican
party.

Comment: If you agree that the Republican Establishment is no friend of the American people and has long treated us like dirt, defeating them would be a positive thing. Many have tried and failed. You may recall the Tea Party--which was co-opted on day one. Trump defeating the GOP E was a bigger accomplishment than his winning the presidency in my view.